Astana Private Jet Charter

1. Astana Airport, UACC, TSE, Astana (Akmola), Kazakhstan

Astana rose out of the grasslands much like Dubai rose out of the sea. In less than two decades, the modernistic city appeared on the skyline. Astana was a small town on the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan in 1997 when President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev moved the capital there from Almaty.

His transformation of the country has been so popular that he still rules, being re-elected in a landslide in April 2015. He convinced the International Exhibitions Bureau to hold Expo 2017, an International Specialized Exhibition, in Astana. The theme will be Future Energy, which is fitting to a city built with billions in oil profits in a country with vast fossil fuel reserves, copper, uranium and zinc. Businesses that extract the oil and minerals drive Kazakhstan’s economy.

Russian is the official language of Kazakhstan but more than half the population also speaks the native Qazaq. Seventy percent of the population is Muslim and 26 percent Christian (mostly Russian Orthodox).

Astana is a city of contrasts, from its temperature -- ranging from minus-40 F in the winter to 86 degrees F in the summer -- to its culture. Visitors can see the multi-story glass-and-granite Pyramid of Peace and Accord, which holds an opera house and has white doves on the windows to pay homage to peace. Yet, not far away, on the outskirts of the city, they can watch the savage equestrian sport of kokpar (known as buzkashi in Afghanistan), a polo game of sorts in which riders use bare hands instead of a mallet and pick up headless sheep or goats from the ground instead of whacking a ball. Instead of goal posts, there are caldrons in which riders deposit the carcasses, which must weigh at least 66 pounds. Each team has four riders who collide into and push each other, making it a violent contact sport. Kokpar is expected to be a star attraction at Expo 2017.

Another opera house, the opulent Astana Opera, which has a theater that seats 1,500, a ballet school and a museum, was designed by a group of international architects and opened in 2013. Its huge lobby is beige and red Italian marble in which hangs an almost two-ton glass chandelier. The building, a mix of Greco-Roman and Baroque architecture, is another in a series of government buildings and monuments envisioned by Nazarbayev and built with government money. Yet, not far away, atop a hill, sits the Gulag Memorial. It was built in honor of the women imprisoned in gulags of the former Soviet Union because they were married to men considered traitors.

Astana, one of the busiest construction sites in the world, is projected to grow significantly by 2030. And it won’t be all city. Visitors will also see parks and forests along the skyline. The city’s long-range plan calls for 185,000 acres of trees to be planted.